bone ash sky (katerina cosgrove)

The shadow of Palestine hangs over Cosgrove’s novel. It connects two massacres, the Armenian genocide and the Sabra and Shatila killings in Lebanon in 1982. The novel traces the forced flight of a family from Ottoman Armenia in 1916, following three generations who eventually make Beirut their home. The key narrative hook is told from the POV of Anoush, the third generation, whose grandparents were Armenian and whose father was a falangist allied to the Israeli invaders who participated in the 1982 massacre. There might be said to be a twin thesis to the book. On the one hand, with echoes of Elias Khoury, there is the logic of generational angst meaning that violence is hard-wired into people’s DNA, and history will continue to throw up more and more instances of inhuman brutality. On the other hand, the novel reaches for an optimistic, multi-faith final act, as Anoush succeeds in transcending religious difference in a cosmopolitan city which has, for now, achieved the same thing. The events of the past two years, (and I write these words on the 7th of October), would sadly seem to lend more credence to Cosgrove’s first thesis. 

stasiland (anna funder)

Funder’s non fiction book is an anecdotal investigation into the legacy of the DDR. An Australian living in Berlin ten years after the wall fell, she takes on a journey into her own curiosity about the ghost country she inhabits. What was it like to live there during the days of communism? Funder uses her easy-going naivety to reach places a more formal investigator might not. The result is a series of encounters with the winners and losers of the regime. Those who helped to shape its repressive regime and those whose lives were devastated by it. She gets drunk with rock stars and speaks to the people are who literally trying to piece together the crimes of the Stasi, from the shredded paper they left behind. Perhaps because she’s such an outsider, a female antipodean, people seem willing to open up to her and her account is at once shocking, amusing and melancholic.

cold enough for snow (jessica au)

Au’s brief tome, a novella, is another text which would appear to flirt with the genre of auto-fiction (although who is to know?) as the Australian narrator goes on a trip to Japan with her mother, who was raised in Hong Kong. In the course of the trip, the narrator indulges in a few recollections, (of kayaking on a lake, of a childhood visit to Hong Kong), and some meditations on the nature of family. With her mother, she visits museums and takes trains across the country, before their paths separate and the narrator goes on a solo walk in a more rural zone. If all of this sounds somewhat mundane, that’s because it is, unashamedly so. Au’s text doesn’t have quite the same laconic tone as the like of Chejfec or Toussaint, whose work explores a similar aesthetic of the quotidian, rather it trades on a shaggy-dog suspense, as the reader suspects that something more dramatic is bound to happen sooner or later, even though it never does. There is a moment of potential tension in the closing pages which is soon punctured, leaving the reader with the not unpleasant sensation of a leisurely stroll through a partial Japan, via Hong Kong and a volcanic lake. 

victims of the aurora (thomas keneally)

Keneally’s short novel reminded me a little of an early Sergio Blanco play I saw last year. (Was it last year? Time seems to have succumbed to snowblindness of late.) The play was about a group of people stranded on the Arctic ice, who gradually pick each other off. The premise of a murder mystery in a snowbound wasteland, where every track is a clue, where just to go outside means to risk your life, has allure, but is very hard to pull off. In part because of the restrictions of this world. Keneally’s high Edwardian tale is set on the expedition of Captain Sir Eugene Stewart to the South Pole, as narrated by the expedition painter, Anthony Piers, who in a framing device is recounting the story from his Californian nursing home, sixty years later. The expedition journalist is murdered and Piers is tasked by Stewart to find out who did it. The ingredients, which include forays into the scientific and artistic goals of the expedition, as well as premonitions of the Great War, make for a rich blend. Yet this is a slight book, over almost before it has begun, and the shards of brilliance which sometimes penetrate the text also have the effect of illuminating the way in which the novel is, to a certain extent, coasting, drifting over its material without ever seeking to explore what it all means. At one point the narrator notes that in the Antarctic, seven million cubic miles of ice lie on top of the six million square miles of the continent. What lies beneath the surface is as vast and important as that which lies above, but no matter how entertaining, the novel rarely succeeds in sending a plumb line below, to explore those hidden depths.  

nick cave and the bad seeds at the teatro del verano, montevideo

Jair Bolsonaro won the first round of the Brazilian election on Sunday. I messaged my friend who is following the campaign for the indigenous candidate for the vice-presidency, Sonia Guajajara, as a photographer. He said her campaign HQ was “like a funeral.”

#

In 1994, Luis Charamello, a sweet-hearted gay actor, invited my 27 year old self, and my friend Sedley, for supper. We knew fuck all about the Latin American history, really. Isolated in a Western European, Anglo-Saxon bubble. We knew there had been a dictatorship, which had only ended 10 years ago. I think we both commented that, all the same, Montevideo seemed very normal. You’d never have guessed. Yes, Luis told us. But we know they’re still out there, waiting. 

#

Twenty five years later, the fascists, the self-avowed fascists, are coming back with a vengeance. Bolsonaro might not have won the presidency in the first round, but he’s going to win the second. Nearly 45% voted for him. The age of social democracy is dying. All over the world. Your right to be the person you choose to be isn’t going to last much longer. You belong to the state. Because fascism, no matter how much it might be dressed up as libertarianism, always comes back to state control and the abolition of individual rights. Bolsonaro has no qualms about taking about indigenous people the same way the white settlers of the the 17th century did. Women do not have equal rights in his world. As for “the minorities” and their right to be different, forget it. Brazil, like the USA, like Russia, like China, like Hungary or Poland, Italy, and my own self-harming country, is heading in one direction and that direction has nothing to do with ‘the rights of man’.

#

On Sunday, the street I live on bustles with life. It’s Día del Patrimonio.A day when the Ciudad Vieja gets transformed, a normally sleepy barrio is consumed by the city. We walk down the street. A trombone player catches Claudia’s eye. Mine is caught by a skinny, tall man in a crisp shirt, with long hair, looking like a decadent banker. It’s Nick Cave, going for a stroll through the Old Town, before he plays his gig with The Bad Seeds on the following day, a gig we’re going to. No-one seems to bother Cave. A photo appears on Twitter of him buying something in front of my house. 

When I first came here, Sedley arrived to visit soon after I’d settled in. He told me he’d been at a party a few weeks ago, and Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss or someone had been there. I told him, somewhat smugly, that part of the reason I liked being here was that no-one had the faintest idea who those people were. The cult of celebrity didn’t appear to hold much sway. It’s changed a bit, but not that much. 

#

The day of the gig, the day after the first round of the Brazilian election, is swelteringly hot. We all know that means a storm is going to break in the evening. In the rehearsal with Claudia and Pato, we talk about Cave and about rock ’n roll and whether the good die young and how you keep going, doing the same thing over and over, time after time. At what point does that repetition imply a distillation of value. How do you keep the flame burning, as you move into your fifties, your sixties. 

One of Cave’s songs references Robert Johnson, the original devil-dealing rock ’n roll star. Or the first documented, mythologised one. There have been rock ’n roll stars since the dawn of time. Johnson, who made the pact and sold his soul, but never sold out. 

#

The Teatro de Verano fills up. We’re in the expensive seats, in the front. A local band, Buenos Muchachos, opens. They are dark and intense. Claudia’s friend is going out with the long haired guitarist. She thinks the friend is in Spain, working on a theatre tour, and sends her a WA video. It turns out the friend is sitting five rows behind. Everyone knows at least half a dozen people at the gig. If you did even three degrees of Kevin Bacon separation, we’d all be cousins. I go to get beers after the Buenos Muchachos and in the queue, an actor starts speaking to me, and then an actress I don’t know appears and says she’s there with my actor, Pato. Montevideo is one big little village. 

#

Nick Cave is a daddy-long-legs. In my mind’s eye he was always a short Tom Thumb figure, but my mind’s eye was all wrong. Nick Cave is a gangly, long-limbed puppet of a man. His limbs splay all over the place. He’s a dancer who convinces through performance rather than grace. In the blink of an eye his body concertinas to the floor, then he’s up, drop-kicking the mike. 

Above all, Cave loves to love and be loved. Pretty soon he’s perched on the barrier separating crowd from stage, held up by nothing more than the strength of a dozen audience members’ hands. His song talks about the heart going ‘boom boom boom’ and he beseeches the audience to place their hands on his open breast and feel his heart going ‘boom boom boom.’ 

#

The night is warm but the storm is coming. Cave and the Bad Seeds’ music plunges into the humid air. Elaborate orchestral arrangements, with cowbells, electric violins, swooning endless choruses. Songs made to be re-arranged, songs which are a journey all of their own.

In the Punk book oral history I’ve just read, there are accounts of the ‘1,2,3,4’ songs. Every song starts like that and ends two minutes later. The book tells of the impact of the Ramones, who I saw in Leeds, in 1984, a decade into their reign. And every song was indeed punctuated by that numeration, as though the songs were olympic sprints, over before you knew it. The cumulative effect was bewildering, dramatic: you didn’t know where one song began and another ended, as though all the songs were all part of one great song whose chorus was ‘1,2,3,4’. As though the band would have been happier playing their forty minute set as one long, impenetrable song, but tradition dictated that this one song be broken down, and Joey Ramone paid lip service to this with the religious use of numerology.

Cave’s songs seemed to have skipped the need for lip service. His songs spiral into themselves, blues riffs which could last all night. Every song has secret rooms and loud rooms and an altarpiece and devotees prostrate before the altar, and renegades spitting at the altar, and Cave in the middle, leading the service like the gothic high priest he aspired to be and then became, the short man who became an alien god. 

#

And in the night there are demons and devils. Cave sings about them, but they’re out there now, I can sense them. Bolsonaro. The guys who go to Trump rallies with T-shirts saying “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” The liars and the snake-oil merchants. They’re always there in the Manichean struggle but for forty years or more they’ve been kept at bay, pushed back, forced into the shadows. The world appeared to belong to tonight’s audience who have come to listen to an Australian and his band shine their mocking light on authority, the smell of weed in the air; a crowd who glory in their difference, their right not to be who their parents wanted them to be, noses pierced, hair dyed, defiantly searching their id. 

When punk kicked off in the grey lowlands of my very youth, the kids recognised that the easiest, quickest ticket to questioning the status quo was to represent yourself as different. Safety pins, plastic clothes, spiked hair. Chains and dog collars. The beauty of ugliness. Once upon a time you could have been shot or lynched for dressing like that. Strapped to a witches’ chair and dunked until you drowned. But the world was so rundown, so down-at-heel, that a chink appeared, a space where the freedom not to be like all the rest opened up, and the punk movement seized that slice of light and used it to prise society open.

Which has lead to this place, here, this night, beneath the stars. Where the threat has been forgotten. Where liberty, in the shape of a six-foot Australian and his demented band, strides the blast, saying, Yeah Yeah Yeah. Telling us to push the night away. 

#

I glance over my shoulder. The lightening in the clouds above the great open spaces of the River Plate is constant now. Cave doesn’t speak much to his audience. He has other ways of communicating, song and trance and hypnosis, but now he looks to the sky and tells us that the storm is coming. It’s held off, but it’s coming. He wants the rain. You can sense it. He’ll play until the rain comes. He’s playing for the storm.

Then he surges out into the auditorium. He scales the barrier and climbs the steps. They reach out to touch him. They scream ‘thank you, Nick’ or ‘gracias Nicki’. He reaches the divide, where the cheap seats are perched high in the bowl of the Teatro de Verano. On stage his image is filmed, projected back. The priest with his congregation. He stands there, glorious in the adulation.

The song surges, ebbs, gets lost in time. He’s there with his people for an hour or two or three or four. For a day or two or three or four. For all the years of their lives. 

Then he’s back on stage and the rain comes. Fat dollops of rain, falling like manna. ‘At last,’ he says, ‘the fucking rain’.

And then the band really starts to play. 

We stand there under the rain which falls in sheets now. Is the rain a presage of the flood? Or is it washing away our sins? Or is it all of this and more? 

The stick-man on stage plays the piano, communes with his followers. He wants to be part of the band, he wants to be part of the crowd, he wants to be everything and nothing all at once. 

The rain falls and the night is a blasted heath and we push the darkness away. 

berlin syndrome (d. cate shortland, w. shaun grant)

Mr Curry recommends Berlin Syndrome. As the film goes on, he becomes more and more amused by this fact. Afterwards he tells me the director’s first film was great. Meanwhile I’m trying to make sense of how a female director can bring herself to make such a wilfully exploitative film. If Eil Roth or one of his ilk had done this, there would by righteous and justifiable complaints of misogyny. Young woman gets abducted and incarcerated and abused. Her abductee buys her frilly underwear and there’s a two minute montage of her posing for him wearing said garments. Young woman is tied up, beaten up, maltreated, all in the name of our entertainment. The title alludes to Stockholm Syndrome, when a hostage falls for his/ her captor. All of which suggests a degree of psychological complexity which the film does no more than pay lip service to. The opening (which is essentially Victoria mark 2, be wary any young female who ever goes alone to Berlin), includes leaden plot notes such as the protagonist discovering a toy wolf mask in the street. The ending is so farcical it’s almost brilliant. Almost, not quite. Somehow the film manages to soak up two hours of screen time. It’s like a bad jazz riff, going over the “how will this end” refrain until we begin to fear that it will never end. We too have been incarcerated. Perhaps the filmmaker hopes that that some kind of syndrome will afflict us and we’ll fall in love by default, but somehow I resisted.

the hunter (d. daniel nettheim, w. alice addison, wain fimeri)

This is a tragic movie. It's tragic because the lovely heroine gets fried and no-one seems to care. It's tragic because the last living Tasmanian Tiger is killed off. It's also tragic because a great actor, Willem Dafoe, stomps around the movie in a pale imitation of his role in Antichrist, looking as though he's just about past it. Like sportsmen and ballet dancers, one suspects there must come a moment in the actor's life when he realises he's past the prime of manhood and his dignity would be better served by an appreciation of this. One thinks of Dick Diver cocking up his Cote D'Azur water-skiing stunt in Tender is the Night. A great man humbled is a tragic thing to see, and Dafoe ends up looking faintly ridiculous as he runs around to no great effect, still rugged, but bearing the first hints of the geriatric he will one day become, as must we all. (It's another example of Eastwood's innate sassiness that he recognised the need to pastiche his image, thereby subverting the ridicule which might have come his way as he aged.) 

Does The Hunter warrant Defoe's exertions? No doubt he had fun learning how to skin a possum and clumping around in the wonderful Tasmanian wilderness, but there must have been a nagging doubt in his mind as he saw which way the script was going. There's some neat ideas which are never developed in any detail (His relationship with the children; the missing Tiger itself.) But too much of the film is spent with Dafoe, the hunter, driving back and forth in his four by four, always one step behind just about everyone. The plot, with its loggers and eco-warriors, gets lost in the peat bogs, and there's plenty of cute detail which doesn't seem to serve any real purpose (Speakers in trees, Dafoe's love of opera, the kid's drawings etc). In the end, there are too many ingredients. The script feels as though it's been recycled so many times it doesn't know if it's one green bottle or a pair of pyjamas. 

Having said all this, if you like sweeping nature shots and Tasmanian devils, then this film is for you.

the beach beneath the street [mckenize wark]

McKenzie Wark’s book narrates the history, theory and practice of the Situationists, an apparently marginal movement in twentieth century cultural history. It couldn’t be much more timely. The likes of Paul Mason have recently been labelling the nascent “Occupy” movement as a kind of Situationist protest. Highly visible, non-confrontational, this movement converts town centres into a kind of playground/ camping site. In keeping with the reclaim the streets movement, it’s aim is both to reappropriate public space and to flag up the potential for alternative modes of living within the heart of the capitalist domain.

Exploring alternative methods of living is all part of the Situationist project. Attempting to find cracks in the system which would allow people to engage with their humanity and creativity in a post-capitalist, even post-Marxist fashion. In a strange way, from Wark’s account of Debord, Jorn et al’s thinking, in some ways modern capitalism seems to have embraced some aspects of the project. In an Apple-shaped world, we are all potential filmmakers, writers, musicians creatives. I-men and i-women are expected to incorporate these qualities into their everyday existence. It’s almost a crime not to. On the other hand, capitalism’s dependence on individualism means that this activity tends to occur in a fractured, isolated context. Society as a whole still prioritises the individual’s economic production as the index of their worth. The situationist dream of a restructured society, liberated from the tyranny of wage labour, seems as far away as ever.

Wark’s prescient book steers the reader through this evolving and frequently complex history, ranging from the theory of Debord to the seemingly dilettante antics of the likes of Isou in the fifties. There’s something about Situationism which appears on some levels to be Romantic and insubstantial. In part this is because it’s a movement that never proselytised, content to remain a club one was invited to join (or was thrown out of) rather than a party seeking members. Wark does a strong job of rectifying this, examining the texts and the more rigorous philosophical writings of the movement’s key members. This is a detailed introductory handbook to a way of thinking that might just be on the point of coming into its own, fifty years after its heyday. It also makes one wonder who are the contemporary intellectual architects of the current political movement, labouring away in obscurity, their work filtering through into the mainstream, their names as yet unheralded.

animal kingdom (d. david michôd)

I don't know if this is down to my state of mind at the moment or the film itself. Animal Kingdom's merits as a film are indisputable. The acting is impressive, the story-telling is effective, there's a bleached deadness to the grade and sufficient longeurs in the editing to allow the film to breathe. I was engaged throughout. Yet even as I left the cinema the film had already washed over me and now, less than two days since seeing it, I struggle to recollect any overwhelming feeling in response to it. As I say, I don't know if this is due to the film or my own personal sense of current alienation. Perhaps, being a film that in some ways deals with the notion of alienation, through an impressive central performance from James Frecheville, it hit a nerve that is partially dead.

There's a lot of Scorcese in the background in the tale of a crime family from the Melbourne suburbs. Scorcese gets everywhere these days. You can't move for Scorcese. The slow-motion takes, reminiscent of Mean Streets, were one of the film's weaker tropes. However, early Scorcese works not just because of its vivid technical qualities, but also because of the film-makers ability to present his world, the edges of Little Italy. In a similar way, Michod captures the low-level Anglo-Saxon tropicality of an Australian suburb. Seemingly the antithesis to gloomy , rainy England, in actuality Australia sometimes feels like a Platonic experiment at the creation of a sun-bleached nirvana that has gone weirdly off the rails. And Michod gets to grip with this sense of unease, showing us a society where sociopaths determine social structures and no-one can escape their influence.

As I say, there's much to admire in this film. I have a feeling Michod will make more films and become successful. It will be interesting to see if he stays in his native land or not. The offers will be flooding in. Making a good crime thriller is one of the hardest things to do. The audience doesn't just have to buy into the actions of characters at odds with society; they also have to believe in their world. Animal Kingdom achieves all that. Even if it leaves you as numb as J, it's monosyllabic protagonist, a young man whose future seems doomed both before the film begins and after the credits have rolled.

rampage [dir george gittoes]

Rampage tells the story of three brothers. One dies. Another’s in Iraq. The third, whom the film finally concentrates on, goes looking for a recording contract.

All three brothers are rappers. The film is created around the notion that it’s as dangerous to live on the wrong side of the tracks in Miami as it is to live in Baghdad. Whilst shootings are clearly rife in Dade County, it still seems to be pushing it to say it’s worse than Iraq. A soldier says at one point that he’s safer in Baghdad, which may be the case for a US soldier but not, in would seem, for many. However, the film seems to realise that the comparison is tenuous if not odious, and the focus shifts away from the elder brother in Baghdad after the middle brother Marcus is shot in a gang incident at a party.

As the director/ narrator says, the younger 14 year old brother speaks like Shakespeare. Rap, rhyme, words, are part of all the brothers’ metabolisms. The younger brother says he started rapping when he was five. The violence that thrives around them seems to fuel their literacy. The rappers write down lyrics, have debates in rap, are more than ready to spontaneously rap about anything, anywhere.

Maybe the violence of their environment fuels this, maybe not. It’s a telling moment when the head of ‘Sony Rap’ or whatever he is, tells the kid that he’s the future of Rap, but that he can’t sing about what he wants to. He needs to become more audience friendly. Parents don’t want their children listening to a 14 year old rapping about AK 47s. You sense that if you try to stop the kid singing about what he has to sing about, he’ll never become the future of Rap. And what he knows about is shootings and drive-bys and his brother being killed.

In the end Rampage seems to skirt around issues. It won’t criticise the suits who tell the younger brother to change his tune. It doesn’t comment on fellow members of the soldier’s ghetto who criticise him for fighting Bush’s war. The film makes the strange choice of flying two of the brothers to Australia for no particular reason. The only time Gittoes comes out with a take on what he is doing as a filmmaker is when he leaves an Australian radio journalist’s query about his actions in the film, replying with an acknowledgement that the media interest he brought to the family might have precipitated Marcus’ killing. There’s probably another movie to be made about the macho documentary maker’s relationship to his subject matter, but we don’t get that here. What we do get is a snapshot of a remarkable community, which oozes poetry like blood; whose children are as proud of the epithet ‘poet’ as they are of being warriors.

It’s the people on the wrong side of the Miami bridge who truly treasure the language we speak.